


only a bullet knows where to run

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Leverage
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Friendship, Gen, Introspection, Mentions of River/Eleven, Road Trips, Romantic Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-16 00:09:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5805631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sophie Devereaux, the con artist River met because she wanted to; because River had read about her in History books from the twenty first century and River could never resist an opportunity to befriend one of her models."</p>
            </blockquote>





	only a bullet knows where to run

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [damnbrunettes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/damnbrunettes).  
> Title from "Only a bullet knows where to run" by Champs  
> Thanks to G for her help.

“Can you come? I’m in London. Grand Central, Monday at four.”

River got Sophie’s call early in the afternoon, at the moment between coffee and work where she’s burying her day. The raising of the earth, of the oceans and depths happens later, in pain and panic and _I am behind_. Papers needed marking, assistants refocusing and she was expected to perform both before the end of the day.

Her ability to relapse every so often in such commonplace thoughts is a source of pride to her. She has worries and shallowness that _her_ parents find boring and it makes her happy. Boredom is a luxury in her life.

Sophie isn’t such shallowness.

Sophie Devereaux, the con artist River met because she wanted to; because River had read about her in History books from the twenty first century and River could never resist an opportunity to befriend one of her models. A TV-show from the thirty third century was based on the titbits of her life that had slipped through the cracks of time and her careful erasing of traces.

River knows so little about Sophie’s life that she cannot be sure the show’s artistic license was that misplaced. River knows so little about Sophie’s life that she cannot be definitive she wants to have Sophie as one of her models. Which is precisely why Sophie and River are cut from the same cloth; probably shared a portion of the outline and fit together when put side by side.

Not shrouded in mystery, cut from it.

The mystery has a cost that Sophie wears in bright, bold colours when wearing them otherwise would be a defeat.

She’s alone.

Of Sophie, River would take the legends and the adventures and the reputations - she did-, but not the loneliness. Not after her childhood, not with prison, not against time. Loneliness isn’t something with which River easily settles. If she had, she wouldn’t have found her parents as a child, she wouldn’t have reached for the Doctor again and again, whatever the face, whatever the humiliation. She seeks loneliness to heal. Any other form of isolation is inflicted, in need of being fought with fire.

Sophie, at the other end of three millennia, sounded more alone than usual.

Because River loved her a bit, like she had loved Corto Maltese, Anaïs Nin or Nefertiti, she decided she would drop by the twentieth century and break the laws of Earth with her very own thief. No activity is as guiltless as stealing with Sophie and River had fared with her share of boredom for the week.

Papers left scattered on her desk, utility belt slapped on her waist and vortex manipulator snuck in a pocket where Sophie cannot ask questions, River materialised in London, twentieth century. She stole a decent enough car and pimped it with a dash of perception filter to avoid trouble. More trouble than sought, that is. River usually finds Sophie because trouble always finds them. But when River meets Sophie at the station, Sophie is torn, pale and pacing outside.

Sophie doesn’t say “hello” when she slumps beside River in the car. She simply asks to be taken out of here.

 

*

 

The first ten minutes are threaded with silence, bar the small demonstrations of anger and wear Sophie displays, extraordinary in the care she puts in hiding them. River knows Sophie too well to interrupt her avoidance. Hers is the kind that doesn’t require reading, strictly forbids it even. She doesn’t ask.

Escaping traffic as they leave the city provides distraction -challenge, even- and River adds another reason to her mental list of “why letting Sophie in on the time-travel vehicle needs to happen soon”.

“You won’t let me drive,“ Sophie asks at a light. The bite is unnecessary, but from the fraying of notes to the hair tangled, she exhausted any other quiet form of release.

River arches an eyebrow for the rear-view mirror, her attention to the scooter that does god knows what behind them.

“My nicer side encourages me to answer I’m being chivalrous here," she replies, distant.

Sophie pulls her jacket higher, the hem of the collar cutting her jaw. Her lips don’t match the eyes or the earrings; they are bare, indiscreetly pink and without outline.

“The side that is slightly angrier at you says you drive like a nutter," River continues, eyes drifting back to the lights. “So no. You don’t drive. Not before you have a rest.”

Sophie visibly tenses and River hurries to add in jest:

“Not before I teach you how to drive properly.”

Sophie’s face is stubbornly veiled behind hair now, haughty. The city she wants to flee so swiftly of greater interest to her. Sophie won’t talk and River is okay with that. Sure. She isn’t there to comfort.

But River lets her concern blink at Sophie, surreptitiously. Sophie lives a dangerous and breakable life.

Disagreeable adventures keep occurring: Sophie dies sometimes. River is in Paris by the late eighties and the face of a girl who probably drowned in the Seine catches her eyes. Another unknown woman of the Seine, the small font whispers between car accidents and robberies. Tiny backwashes in the Parisian flow. Art student with heartaches.

Of course not: con artist in need of a way out.

For a second, at the most, pain punctures River’s chest.

Time can be rewritten.

Sophie can be drowned and not recovered. Worse. Sophie can be alive and not recovered. The calls and cards that find River are far and off. Sophie weaves words of comfort and life into her ears and into her heart and River lets her because she knows of the vital need to preserve oneself entirely.

River can feel the wear of the fabric of Sophie’s reality and every seam that appears, every thread that escapes, draws a map to her own lies. Families, lovers, friends; lost. Tender nights told like one of the one thousand and one, witty remarks swapped like movie, theatre, laughing lines. She grows old into her lies, they both do.

River is just another string on Sophie’s web of stories.

 

*

 

Sophie could have been sleeping for the past hour – she’s still, lids closed, arms wrapped around her chest. Asleep, she is a woman River rarely glimpses; she looks her age, she looks blank. Story-less and switched-off. She looks like someone who steals and lies for a living. She could have been hurting for the past hour and River cannot tell.

River doesn’t know Sophie.

Yet, as Sophie is now, without a name or a bearing or a lilt, for once, she is no other than herself.

River married her, somehow, somewhere, sometime before; Sophie was both romantic and vain enough to accept. “Who are you really?” was never part of the vows.

Sophie might be subtle enough to distinguish between the fantasies and the confessions in the words River whispers to her when they are together. But she doesn’t tell. Telling would mean everything and it would mean nothing. They agreed on that.

They’re both alone.

Sophie reminds River of the Doctor; all her aliases, all her incarnations, all her bodies.

There’s an Annie with razors at her fingertips and consonants like Manchester docks; there’s a Belinda with burgundy hair and lips like rough velvet. And they are both her wife. River knows the way Sarah likes to fold her legs under the table and the way Charlotte needs to be laughed into foreplay.

It’s a stage; their whole marriage is an anthology of plays: a night at the opera to steal a priceless jewel on the loudest note of _The Barber of Seville_ ; an afternoon in a white dacha visited by murmurs to con a gentlewoman from Verona; a morning disguised as sailors on the pristine deck of an old sailing ship to semi-legally obtain its act of ownership –River was missing the T.A.R.D.I.S. And all the hours they spent in-between, exhausted, lazy, excited, endlessly planning and basking in their own wickedness.

Dreaming, maybe, of how natural a life this was for the other and of what dull phantoms they didn’t have to dodge when they were running from guards with rigged Degas at hand.

River would want Sophie to admire the woman River is when they steal together. She would settle for Sophie to be drawn to the mystery she suspects. But Sophie seems to hold on to something else, because River was distracted along the way of simply hanging out with criminals from the past shrouded in mystery and Sophie, in her own non time-travelling way, noticed.

Sophie, the crook, the petty and vain thief that will die alone and without a name, reminds her of home.

She _is_ home, with her earthiness and mystery, with her lies and tongues, with her lack of knowledge about time paradoxes and ends of the universe. She’s an outcast from Earth, like River is an outcast from outer space. Sophie is loved by precisely the people she needs to be loved by.

Sophie is silent tonight because she may want to be loved by River.

 

*

 

As they are nearing Folkestone, Sophie suddenly checks on her cell-phone, an artefact from the 1990s, and idly navigates through her contacts. She’s busying her hands, not looking.

For a fraction of second longer than the other names, the cursor highlights William and River catches her breath. Sophie notices and flinches, slipping the phone back into her jacket. She does not attempt to cover up and stares at River’s profile, waiting for a comment. If River looks back, Sophie will avert her eyes.

So River peruses the British landscape, blank.

They drive in silence for the next five minutes.

“I was young before you were,” Sophie dramatically observes.

River frowns. They are nowhere near where Sophie grew up - where River investigated and concluded she grew up. Unfair disadvantage: she studied Sophie’s past and Sophie studied the lies River told her on top of her head, yet Sophie probably got more out of her.

“Somehow and unfortunately, yes,” River simply answers, trying to remember how she spun the _grew up with her parents, disappeared in Berlin_ thing.

After a beat, and as she senses Sophie was expecting something, anything, to come out of the quip, River adds, making up a hint of sarcasm for her passenger: “This is low, even coming from you. And skipping youth is bad, folks, don’t do it.”

River laughs for herself, because this is getting less and less about Sophie, and she wishes she wasn’t telling so much of the truth in trying to lie, but Sophie doesn’t follow her.

“I bailed out early,” Sophie pensively says, eyes trained on the black outside.

At the corner of River’s eyes, Sophie fiddles with something between her fingers. It’s a torn note, short words scribbled on a post-it. River catches “sorry” in a handwriting that isn’t Sophie’s, but could be one of hers. Sophie absently brings the note to her lips, but the paper never touches them.

Like the “sorry,” it doesn’t belong to her anymore.

So many bloody lies.

River takes a turn to the left and a dark breath.

“You’re still there, you know.”

At last, Sophie cranes her neck against her hand, looking directly at her, and River carries on, impervious to the accusation in her eyes.

“I checked on you when I went to close my file. Your case, it’s still open.”

There is a brief moment during which River wonders if Sophie will jump out of the car, congratulate her perhaps, laugh. _Please, laugh_ , she finds herself thinking. Sophie silent, Sophie not spinning lies, Sophie not hiding, River finds her lethal. But Sophie sighs and looks away.

“It figures,” she breathes. “How do I end this?”

River deeply exhales, struck by how easy it was. Sophie knows far too much about the nothings she gave her.

“Be found,” River replies. “Tell them you are safe and cannot come back.”

“That would be cruel even for me,” Sophie retorts and the corners of her eyes laugh ever so slightly. Brutally and briefly, then with shame. She’s proud of herself.

“Going back is not an option,” she coolly says.

River saw nothing but that spark, desperate and proud, and that doesn’t suffer, doesn’t say, never stops.

“Hi, Mum, Dad, I’m a felon.” River smirks, before giving Sophie a side glance. “That worked with my parents.”

Sophie doesn’t take note of the confession and remains silent. Her pouting mouth is as good as a shrug for now.

 

*

 

In crimes, they run hand in hand, drunk with danger. Except Sophie doesn’t get drunk in danger. She’s focused.

The drunkenness comes only afterwards, when they’re breathing hard and fast in the front seats of a car, escaping.

Sophie drives. She always does. She is commuting.

Crime is her day job. Well, night job.

Sophie fears prisons above all because she can die – she doesn’t want to worry about death. River fears death because she cannot die –not easily at least. What will kill her will be exhausting her, will find her when she will be worn and empty.

River doesn’t want to be worn, rid of her love for the Doctor, for her family, for people like Sophie. Sophie will run till the end of her rope. She will find death because crime is her daytime job. It’ll be a payout, a debt finally acquitted. She will die with the same sound on her lips that the curtain makes when hitting the stage, heavy.

River will die as magic dies, with a poof of smoke and the fear of having revealed the trick. She envies Sophie.

The inside of the car is dark save for the fireflies stuck on the control panel. Lit numbers and symbols lend atmosphere, Sophie’s sunk figure sits besides, River’s own strands of hair curtain the darkness.

If River lets her mind wander, the sound of oxygen been pumped into her helmet, the buzz of life monitoring her heartbeats would fill the cockpit and her head. Trapped in her head trapped in her helmet. In periphery, disturbing event, Sophie flutters in the middle of her memories, alive and alien, unaware of the life she anchors in the car.

Sophie is so young compared to her, to her Doctor, her parents, even, who waited and died.

But Sophie lived lifetimes in lies and died in detonating dreams, little fantasies set to defuse the people she had been. Sophie chose to be old in lies, daring fate to retrieve all the years and loves she was pinching.

Sophie’s hand slips on River’s thigh, careful, as if afraid of repeating a pattern River saw her use to swindle infatuated rich marks. Nothing is easy here; sincere. Fond. Attached.

Sophie knows only lies about River, but she takes care not to use her. Her dark eyes are set on River now.

Sophie’s attention makes River bite back the tears, and with it, the throbbing of her memories. She turns her head away, to the road, aware of having lost a match she didn’t know she was sparing. Not lost; brought back to perspective.

Sophie is a thief; she is the present. When you belong in all of time and space, these practicalities matter. Sophie means nothing to River and she means everything.

“William was not just a mark, was he?” River attempts, headfirst.

Sophie is looking out again, an elbow propped up the frame, deft fingers brushing her lower lips, a furrow between her brows. Thieves with regrets, with hearts, with bodies on their mind. You never share those.

Her right hand has found River’s fingers on the seat and latches there, repenting.

“People are never just marks,” Sophie whispers. “Not when I’m with them.”

A wave of gratitude washes over River.

Tonight, River settles, when they are drunk with danger and spent with wickedness, as Sophie brushes a kiss against her cheek, River will tell her about time travel and take her to meet the Minoans.

But later, much later, perhaps Sophie doesn’t believe River, perhaps she is simply proving her again why River married her, they end up driving the T.A.R.D.I.S. to France to steal costumes from the Opéra Garnier, with a hair-pin and Spanish stamps, twenty first century, present.


End file.
